The first fuel tanker that the military will use to drain the Navy’s underground Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility arrived at Pearl Harbor early Wednesday morning.

The 600-foot merchant tanker Empire State, home-ported in Wilmington, Del., is crewed by 21 civilian mariners and can take on 11 million gallons of fuel. It arrives just one day after the state Department of Health conditionally approved the defueling plan laid out by Joint Task Force-Red Hill, the military organization the Pentagon established to drain the 104 million gallons of fuel in the Red Hill tanks.

The tanks sit just 100 feet above a critical aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water. With the last approvals from the DOH and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the arrival of Empire State, JTF-RH is on schedule to begin defueling Monday.

“We have finished all of our safety reviews, all of our material checks, all of our tests,” said JTF-RH commander Vice Adm. John Wade. “We’re really at the last dotting i’s and crossing t’s.”

JTF-RH has spent the past year making repairs and upgrades to the aging World War II-era Navy facility, which holds the military’s strategic fuel reserve for the Pacific region, as well as the pipelines that connect the tanks to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. From there, the Empire State and other commercial tankers will move the fuel in portions as the military gradually drains the tanks.

Most of the fuel at Red Hill will go into tankers, but Wade said that “there are some sequences where we move fuel into Pearl Harbor, there’s some above-ground storage tanks, and those are to support continued fleet operations and training, most importantly for Hickam so that we can continue to do our (air operations).”

Wade said that there will be some marine diesel for ships stored in above-ground tanks, but added “if we have to fuel ships, we’ve built a plan not to have to do that.”

“In fact we’ve got oil tankers that are off the coasts that are going to be conducting underway replenishment,” said Wade. “One of the destroyers, instead of getting refueled on base is going to go to the port of Hono­lulu and get contracted fuel. So we’re working on that. But when the tankers leave, they’re going to go to different locations.”

Wade said the tankers will be ferrying fuel to facilities in West Oahu run by Island Energy Services at Campbell Industrial Park, to a fuel storage point in San Diego, Calif., a fuel storage point in the Philippines at Subic Bay, and another fuel storage point in Singapore.

The military began making plans to defuel the tanks after a November 2021 incident at the facility in which jet fuel leaked into the Navy’s water system that serves 93,000 people on Oahu, including military families and civilians in former military housing areas.

Local officials had long warned that storing the fuel reserve over the aquifer threatened Oahu’s water supply, but for years the Navy insisted that the facility was safe and that it was critical to supporting the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s vast regional operations. After the November 2021 spill the Pentagon initially resisted a state emergency order to drain the tanks, asserting Hawaii had no legal authority to make it do so.

In March 2022, the Pentagon made a sharp about-face when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the military would drain the tanks and permanently shutter the facility. Navy officials began acknowledging that the facility had fallen into a state of deep disrepair and that it needed extensive work to safely remove the fuel without risking further spills or threats to the aquifer.

Austin also said that the military would pursue a new “distributed” model of storing fuel at various locations around the Pacific, as well as “afloat locations” aboard tankers. Austin’s announcement contradicted Navy officials’ arguments about Red Hill being critical for operations as he argued that taking the fuel out of Red Hill would make military supply lines in the Pacific more “resilient” and keep fuel closer to where U.S. forces would need it in the event of a conflict or crisis.

The Pacific Fleet has emphasized operations around the South China Sea, a critical waterway that one-third of all trade moves through and is at the center of bitter disputes over territorial and navigation rights. China has claimed the entire waterway as its exclusive sovereign territory over the objections of neighboring countries, and has built bases on disputed islands and atolls to assert its claims. The Pacific Fleet has been conducting nearly constant “freedom of navigation” operations in response, against China’s objections.

During the 2022 iteration of the biennial exercise Rim of the Pacific — the world’s largest naval war game — participating ships from 26 countries refueled themselves without Red Hill after years of the facility playing an important role in the exercise. Instead, participants relied on “consolidated cargo operations,” during which specially outfitted commercial tankers under military supervision transfer cargo through connected lines while underway. Essentially, the tanker ships served as gas stations at sea for ships.

According to numbers released to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser by the Navy’s 3rd Fleet after the 2022 exercise, participants used 20.7 million gallons of fuel. Tankers transferred 16.1 million gallons of marine diesel fuel to ships and 2.57 million gallons of JP5 jet fuel. An additional 2 million gallons was also transferred to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln before its departure from the exercise.

3rd Fleet commander Vice Adm. Sam Boyle said “that kind of takes away some of the requirements for fixed-site logistics of like Red Hill … we take whatever parts were dealt, and we look for the silver lining, and in this case we really did move our capability and our proficiency at refueling at sea for all of our partner nations to new heights.”

Some critics of the Navy’s new fueling strategy have expressed concern that tankers at sea and above-ground fuel storage tanks on land are vulnerable to attack, particularly from Chinese missiles. But military officials now say that keeping 104 million gallons of fuel above Honolulu’s water is itself a national security risk that it can no longer afford to take as it tries to repair relations with residents that have become much more wary of the military’s footprint in the islands.

JTF-RH expects to remove most of the fuel from the Red Hill tanks by the end of January with commercial tankers coming in and out of Pearl Harbor to haul it. But the longterm closure and remediation of the facility by the Navy is expected to take at least three years.